Season 3 Episode 4 Change in the Emotion Ocean
In this episode, we learn how our emotions can help us create change in our lives.
In this episode, Nancy talks to a leading psychologist and expert in emotions, who tells her all about how our emotions can help us create change in our lives. She learns about the kind of self-reflective emotions-- like pride, jealousy, and embarrassment-- that can be a real challenge to untangle. Then she shares a story about a time when she felt totally lost in a sea of her own messy emotions, and how she learned how to pop her head out from under the water and float to shore. She learns about the kind of self-reflective emotions-- like pride, jealousy, and embarrassment-- that can be a real challenge to untangle. Then she shares a story about a time when she felt totally lost in a sea of her own messy emotions, and how she learned how to pop her head out from under the water and float to shore.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Nancy's personal experiences with getting lost in the emotion ocean.
Information and insights from Dr. Jessica Tracy.
How to learn more about Self Loyalty School.
Learn more about Dr. Jessica Tracy:
Find Jessica on Twitter @ProfJessTracy
Order Jessica's book: https://www.amazon.com/Take-Pride-Deadliest-Secret-Success/dp/0544273176
+ Read the Transcript
Nancy Jane Smith: [00:00:00] Hey guys, it's me. Nancy Jane Smith. Welcome back to the happier approach. The show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. Inner peace is something that can be really hard to cut. Particularly with all the curve balls and changes that life throws at us. I know there have been times for me when it's been really hard to tap into the feeling that I'm on the right path, that I'm making positive changes when I'm stuck in what I call the emotion ocean. For me, the emotion ocean is either feeling too many emotions. Or being so scared of all the emotions bobbing around that, I try to ignore them and pretend they don't exist.
So today we'll talk to an expert on emotions, specifically, big emotions like pride, jealousy, and embarrassment emotions that can be particularly easy to get stuck [00:01:00] in because they tend to require a lot of self-reflection. So we can get totally sucked into the. When you're stuck in the emotion ocean, having to look at yourself and your choices can be the last thing you want to do.
I remember a time in my life when there was so much going on that I didn't know where to go. almost 10 years ago, my husband's epilepsy became more active and his seizures were out of control. My dad was sick with Parkinson's with dementia, and I was feeling stuck in my business. I wanted to teach and write in addition to working one-on-one with clients, my monger, my voice of the inner critic was very active and I had a lot of messy feelings.
I wasn't dealing. If I've been one of my clients, I would have suggested looking at the feeling sheet I had designed, I would have pointed right at the words on the sheet that said lost [00:02:00] hopeless, unsure, frightened, unworthy, somber, and powerless. But at the time I wasn't about looking at my. I just knew that I didn't feel happy and I needed to feel happy.
I was going through the motions of life, but dealing with all those messy feelings or should I say not dealing with all those messy feelings was keeping me stuck and I needed to find a way out. I had the idea in the bathroom. After a speaking event, I had. I remember washing my hands, thinking how much I loved teaching and how I wished I could do it every day. And a voice from inside of me said, why not? Let's open up a space. So I came up with the loft. The loft was short for the live happier left, which was an idea I had for cute, comfortable place where like-minded people who wanted to be happier, could gather to [00:03:00] hear a variety of topics about living with.
And it was adorable, super cute and inviting. I set out to find a space that would support this vision. And I found an adorable loft size place where I could see clients and host gatherings of enthusiastic learners. Other people struggling to find happiness. I built it. I published a monthly calendar with weekly workshops on anxiety management, mindfulness seminars, classes on creativity and group programs on living habits.
But no one came, my one-on-one clients came for their appointments, but those groups of people I was going to work with and teach, they didn't come mainly because, well, I didn't invite them looking back. I thought my biggest fan, my inner voice of self loyalty was the voice that was guiding me to open the loft.
But now I can see it was my BFF, my voice of self-indulgence or false self. [00:04:00] She was convincing me. The loft was the cure for what was ailing me. She was tired of my monger hammering me for not being happy. And this was an easy, quick solution. Do what you love, build it. And they will come and you will be happy.
But getting the word out about the loft to people who weren't already, my clients was the part that my BFF failed to share with me. She just saw the fun, joyful part. Building the loft would be a big, bold movement and big bold movements. Let the universe know you are ready for big, bold thing for big bold things.
Yeah. That is all my BFF. Looking back. I can see it. I was overwhelmed and feeling a lot of different emotions. My monger was hammering me for not being more successful, not being a better daughter or a more caring wife. So my BFF thought, great. Let's do [00:05:00] something big and bold that will bring her joy and we can get away from these messy emotions.
But all the loft did was bring more messy emotions remorse because I wasn't doing all the things necessary to make it work jealous of what other people were accomplishing in their careers, frustrated with myself because I wasn't doing it right. Or this would be better looking back. A lot of what I was feeling deep in that emotion ocean were emotions that forced me to really take a look at me.
To be self-reflective and own my feelings. Of course, that was the last thing I wanted to do. If only I'd been able to talk to Dr. Jessica Tracy, back then
Jessica Tracy: for most of our behavior, emotions are critical that the reason that we do most things, we do not everything, but most things we do is because of emotions.
Nancy Jane Smith: This is Dr. Jessica Tracy. She's a professor of [00:06:00] psychology at the university of British Columbia. She studies emotions and how they affect human behavior. You
Jessica Tracy: know, when you get up in the morning and you brush your teeth, first thing, that's not an emotion guided behavior, you don't have to think, oh my God, the dentist is going to be so angry.
I'm going to get a cavity. Right. You don't have to do that. Cause it's just. For things that are not habit driven, you know, like going and getting a vaccine, for example, like that's something that we do because of fear, right? We don't want to get the disease. And so we go ahead and do this thing that we know is not gonna be pleasant. It's gonna be uncomfortable. It might be painful and so on, but we force ourselves to overcome that.
Nancy Jane Smith: Jessica says that emotions are more than just. They cause us to act in our
Jessica Tracy: bodies emotions. Aren't just thoughts. Right? They're also, they're embodied. I think it's really hard if you're highly aroused and having, you know, for example, a panic attack, right?
You're full of anxiety and you're full of all this stuff. The panic attack is so much more than those thoughts. In fact, the thoughts might be the least of it, right? The best way to come a panic attack is not to think different thoughts. It's to change your breathing.[00:07:00]
Nancy Jane Smith: Not only do emotions guide a lot of our embodied behavior, but they can also keep us stuck in unhelpful or unpleasant patterns, particularly if waiting through those emotions requires a lot of self-reflection. These are the kinds of emotions that Jessica studies self-conscious emotions.
Jessica Tracy: They are the emotions that are all about the self. So the way that we define them is to feel a self-conscious emotion. You have to think about who you are, think about yourself and realize that an event that occurred is either consistent with that self and who you want to be and sort of telling you, yeah, this is, this is me doing a great thing, and that feels really good for who I am or.
Nancy Jane Smith: So, for example, when I started the loft and it opened up a lot of jealous feelings about comparing myself to other people and their careers that happened to, because I was afraid of not living up to my potential, my vision for myself, didn't line up with my sense of self
Jessica Tracy: sort of telling you, oh [00:08:00] gosh, that's not who I want to be. This is not, you know, helping me achieve my goals for the kind of person I want.
Nancy Jane Smith: Jessica spent a lot of her career studying one particular self-conscious emotion.
Jessica Tracy: Pride is an interesting one because there actually are two different kinds of pride. We distinguish between the pride. That's all about achievement and confidence. And basically sort of like, you work really hard for something. Maybe you studied really hard for a test or maybe you're training for a race and then you do it and you did really well. And then you have this feeling of like, wow, that feels really great. And that's what we call authentic pride.
Nancy Jane Smith: Authentic pride is the kind of emotion that motivates us to care about our work and our face. That encourages us to do hard things and have hard conversations.
Jessica Tracy: The reason we, we want to do all that stuff is because we want to feel like we are a good person in all of the various ways that we construct the concept of good.
Nancy Jane Smith: But then there's hubristic pride, hubristic pride,
Jessica Tracy: [00:09:00] which is much more kind of what we think of when we think of arrogance. We know from work in my lab, that when you feel university pride, you are more likely to engage in things like cheating, lying in order to maintain your status. You know, you become disagreeable, hostile, aggressive.
Nancy Jane Smith: It seems obvious, but if we really want to feel good about ourselves, Jessica cautions staying away from engaging with hubristic pride and leaning into our feelings of authentic pride, she says feeling authentic pride can actually compel people to make real changes in their
Jessica Tracy: lives. Those emotions are particularly important and changes in the south because those. That tell us what we want our identity to be like. Right? So when we feel pride, that means we have done something that gets us closer to the kind of identity we want. And it's a good feeling. It's reinforcing. I felt that way when I did this, I'm going to do that again so I can keep feeling that way. And that in turn motivates us to do the things that will get us to the [00:10:00] identity that we want to have.
Nancy Jane Smith: Jessica's even grappled with these emotions. After I
Jessica Tracy: graduated from college, I worked in a cafe for awhile, which was a really fun job, you know, talk to customers, make lattes, that kind of thing. But there was a point at which I felt, you know what, like I really miss those nights when I stayed up all night in college with my friends, you know, we were trying to put together a news magazine. And that was really exciting. That made me feel like I was doing something. I cared about something that was important to me. Something that made me feel like I'm the kind of person I want to be. I'm having fun in this cafe job, but I don't ever have that feeling. Life is good, but I'm missing that feeling of, oh God, it's hard. It's challenging. It's stressful. But I am achieving something that I really care about. And that realization is what pushed me to go back to
Nancy Jane Smith: grad school. 'cause Jessica felt this disconnect, like she was missing that feeling of authentic pride. That's what inspired her to make a change and go back to grad school.
Jessica Tracy: so we're thinking it's the absence of an emotion, but I think we're all kind of aware of. It's [00:11:00] that feeling of when you're just kind of floating, you know, when you're just kind of like going through the motions, phoning it in, you're sorta like, I need to do something to feel good about myself, because I am not excited about who I am.
I'm not doing things that make me feel like I am the kind of person I want to be.
Nancy Jane Smith: Um, that last thing Jessica said about phoning it in and going through the motions. About your day-to-day life, not reflecting who you authentically want to be. That really stuck out to me. The loft was supposed to be my answer, a catch all for everything that was going wrong in my life, but really it was just making me feel disconnected from who I actually was and what I really wanted to do.
I decided to close up the live happier loft when my lease was up from. Right before I packed it all up, my dad died. And as I packed up all the cute, cozy furnishings and prepared to move, I sat among the boxes and the remaining twinkle [00:12:00] lights and sobbed. I was heartbroken about my dad and powerless about my husband and still feeling stuck in my work. But I decided to take all those messy emotions and deal with them in a more authentic. During that time, I recognize the power of acknowledging emotions. And I wrote my book, the happier approach, making big, bold changes often feels like the answer because when you feel like you're going through the motions, you convince yourself a bold move will work, but big, bold moves rarely work because they come from a place of.
And messy emotions, which can lead us to hubristic pride. The kind that led me with my BFF whispering in my ear to open the left. I wouldn't change my experience of the loft. It taught me a few things. The power of unchecked feelings can lead us down some crazy. If I'm tempted to make a big, bold [00:13:00] move, I need to get curious about what I'm feeling that might be driving that.
But most importantly, it confirmed in me that I do love teaching. And now years later, I've taken my love of teaching and transformed it into a school that I'm authentically proud of this time. My biggest fan was guiding me. I call it self-love. It's a cute, comfortable place online that helps people navigate their messy emotions and hear from their biggest fans.
Now I'm able to take a look at the emotion ocean from a bird's eye view, maybe in a beach chair, soaking up the sun. I can acknowledge my emotions as they come and it feels good. It feels like me.
That's it for this week. In our next episode, we're going to talk about change in our bodies. I'll talk to a [00:14:00] movement expert. She will share how even our bodies can get stuck in unhelpful patterns and how to break that cycle. That's next time on the happier. The happier approach is produced by Nicki Stein and me Nancy Jane Smith music provided by pod five and epidemic sound for more episodes to get in touch or to learn more about sup loyalty school, you can visit Nancy Jane smith.com.
And if you like the show, leave us a review. It actually helps us out a lot special. Thanks to Dr. Jessica Tracy for speaking with us. You can find Jessica on Twitter at prof, Jess, Tracy. And if you'd like to order Jessica's book, take pride. Why the deadliest sin holds the secret to human success. You can find the link in our show notes, the happier approach.
We'll be back with another episode in two weeks, take care until the.[00:15:00]